Houston 2035: War for Talent, Personalized Textbooks, & More

The hunt for engineering talent by technology companies is brutal and two tech company CEOs—Gaurav Khandelwal at ChaiOne and Shion Deysarkar at Datafiniti—will bring their experiences on Houston’s strengths and weaknesses at the upcoming Houston 2035 conference May 21.

In 2013, Deysarkar decided to move his company to Austin from Houston because getting talented engineers proved too difficult. Khandelwal, however, is literally a poster boy for Houston’s potential: He is featured in the Greater Houston Partnership’s “City With No Limits” campaign touting the city’s virtues in billboards across town.

That discussion (all in good fun, but meant to be insightful), and more, will take place at TMCx next month, where we are bringing together innovators, entrepreneurs, and investors for an all-day conference aimed at tackling the promise and potential pitfalls of growth in Houston in the decades to come.

We’ve posted our Houston 2035 agenda online today, featuring local innovators in healthcare, life sciences, and energy, as well as education, design and architecture. For example, Rich Baraniuk, who created at Rice University Openstak, the world’s largest textbook, will highlight how technology will enable us to personalize curriculum and teaching resources. Naomi Halas, at Rice’s Laboratory for Nanophotonics and the Rice Quantum Institute, will discuss how her research is creating opportunities in energy beyond oil and gas.

We’re complement these local innovators with some great out-of-town voices and perspective, among them: Bill Aulet from the MIT Center for Entrepreneurship, Andrew Salkin with the Rockefeller Foundation’s 100 Resilient Cities Initiative, and Michael Wilson from Healthcare Highways in Dallas.